WebGL has finally arrived in the browsers. Today’s Chrome 9 release provided WebGL support, so users no longer require a beta or development browser. This now means that developers have the tools to deploy native 3D applications on the web. We provide WebGL tools for chemistry in the ChemDoodle Web Components library. You will now be able to use this library to deploy web-based, chemistry and scientific applications with hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics, natively in browsers. It is our goal to continue to develop and support this open-source library. The ChemDoodle Web Components library already provides leading 2D solutions from images to animations to a full-featured chemical sketcher and now we intend to provide leading web-based 3D solutions. Over the next couple years, we intend to match all functionality in JMol.
WebGL is also coming to Firefox 4 sometime later this month and to Safari soon.